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Wednesday, April 20, 2016

One thing I love here at the lake is the variety of birds we get on our feeder. We get plenty of sparrows and finches but also chickadees, juncos, titmouses (titmice?), cardinals, woodpeckers, and nuthatches. They tend to forget about us while we're away for the winter and it takes a few days for them to rediscover the feeder so I always tempt them with their favorites. Along with some fancy birdseed I like to put out different flavors of suet which always lasts a few days even when the squirrels are nibbling at it. Lately, though, it's been disappearing overnight! I thought maybe the squirrels were super hungry after a long winter but I hadn't seen a single one on the tree. What on earth was chowing down on our suet?? So last night we set up one of our security cameras outside to keep an eye on things. At around 9 PM, this is what we saw...

It's a raccoon!

(His eyes look so eerie in the infrared light!)

We sat and watched him sticking his little raccoon hand into the feeder, grabbing a chunk of suet, and greedily shoving it into his mouth! It was actually kind of cute, watching him chew, chew, chew as he stared into the camera like he knew we were watching. Eventually we scared him away hoping there would be some left for the birds in the morning but he came back a little later to finish eating the rest. Now, I love critters as much as the next person but this guy is obviously going to keep pigging out on the suet every night and that simply won't do! We are going to have to catch him in a live trap and find a place to relocate him to.